Collection Summary: Interview of Robert Breer conducted 1973 July 10, by Paul Cummings, for the Archives of American Art.

Breer speaks of his boyhood in Detroit; his family, and its activities in early auto engineering; attending Stanford University and drawing cartoons for its daily paper; Stanford's art department, his U.S. Army service; the influence of the Tannerhill collection; going to Paris and the art scene there in the 1950s; Galerie Denise René; making his first films in 1952; the experimental film movement and his involvement in it; Studio Parnene and its showings of his films; showings in America; tachism; his return to the United States; the Brussels Fair Film Festival; mutascopes; early sculptures; his "Bent Whale" transitional piece; kinetic sculpture; Tinguely and Oldenburg films; descriptions of some of his sculptures; his design for the Pepsi Cola Pavilion at the Japan Expo in 1970; the Bonino Gallery.

Biographical/Historical Note: Robert Breer (1926-2011) was a sculptor and filmmaker from Tappacu, New York.

This interview is part of the Archives of American Art Oral History Program, started in 1958 to document the history of the visual arts in the United States, primarily through interviews with artists, historians, dealers, critics and others.

How to Use this Interview

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Interview Transcript

This transcript is in the public domain and may be used without permission. Quotes and excerpts must be cited as follows: Oral history interview with Robert Breer, 1973 July 10, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Interview with Robert Breer
Conducted by Paul Cummings
July 10, 1973

Preface

The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview
with Robert Breer on July 10, 1973. The interview was conducted by Paul Cummings
for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Interview

PAUL CUMMINGS: This is Paul Cummings talking to Robert Breer on July 10, 1973.
So let's see, you were born in Detroit, Michigan, to get a chronological sequence
here, in 1926. How did you get from there to Stanford? Give me some background
about . . . . Did you grow up in Detroit? Did you live there a long time?

ROBERT BREER: Well, we will have to go back to my father, who was born in Los
Angeles. His father migrated from Germany in 1840 or thereabouts  about
the gold rush time. Also, when Bismark was unifying the army there was a military
draft threatening a lot of young Germans and they left. So he went West, to
Los Angeles. He was a bachelor.

PAUL CUMMINGS: And his name was what?

ROBERT BREER: Louis. He was known as "Iron" Louis because he was
a blacksmith and his brother was a carriage maker. His specialty was harnesses
and so they called him "Leather" Bill. Somewhere I have a newspaper
clipping mentioning both of them. I think "Iron" Louis was one of
the three blacksmiths in Los Angeles and the one voted least likely to succeed,
but he did well enough to survive and my father was his youngest son.

PAUL CUMMINGS: And your father's name was what?

ROBERT BREER: Carl. When he was 16 years old  the dates don't matter
too much but let's see, he died three years ago and he was 87 and that was 1970
so he was 16 years old in 1900. Well, somewhere in there, with the help of his
older brother who was a blacksmith as well  they had a foundry in their
back yard in downtown Los Angeles  he built a steam car, the first automobile
to be built in California. He was a young kid so that is an impressive achievement,
I guess, and on the strength of that he got a scholarship to Stanford. He was
in a trade high school of some kind and got sent to Stanford along with his
car. I went to Stanford for obvious reasons. My older brother was sent to Stanford
in the '30s and I went out there in 1943.

PAUL CUMMINGS: You have five brothers?

ROBERT BREER: There are four. My younger one died a few years ago. There are
three of us now and the other two are businessmen of sorts.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Your father obviously went into automobiles.

ROBERT BREER: That's right. He went to Stanford and came East then. He was
an inventor. He invented a lot of different things, strange items that helped
pay his way through school also. One of them was a hair brush. You could pull
a lever on the side of the hairbrush and it would flatten out so you could put
it inside your hip pocket. Everybody needs one, with a little place for the
comb to slide in. And that actually brought in royalties. And another thing
which is no longer used, a safety clip which locked something called a watch
fob on your lower vest pocket and put in one pocket and then over to the other
pocket and there was a clip for that. This was a foolproof clasp. That brought
in money, anyhow. In that meantime he was studying engineering and he had various
jobs as an engineer and eventually went into the automobile business and he
moved to, I think it was, somewhere in Wisconsin and then to New Jersey with
a man who turned out to be my uncle eventually, another engineer, and a third
man. The three of them had an engineering team. Walter Chrysler in 1927, I guess,
wanted to form his own company, and he brought them in as consulting engineers.
So they designed the first Chrysler automobile in New Jersey because of liberal
corporation laws. So my older brothers were born in East Orange or some place
and then we moved to Detroit when the business went there. That was how I got
there. I probably didn't get there that way. [Laughter] Automobiles . . . everywhere,
you know.

PAUL CUMMINGS: You were born there and you lived there until you went to Stanford?

ROBERT BREER: Yes. I left when I was 16 and that was during the war in '43.
I went right away to school from there without any intervening summer gap because
of the war. The idea was that eventually I was going to go into the army so
the hope was to get more education.

PAUL CUMMINGS: What was it like growing up in Detroit?

ROBERT BREER: Oh well, I guess if you ever talk to anybody, Detroit is a two-class
town, blue collar and white collar. It's got the automobile industry and an
awful big labor force and all the managing body live outside in the suburbs.
Eventually that was where we lived, in a place called Grosse Pointe, infamous
suburb. It's incredible. I guess it is well known  I don't know, I guess
I don't have to describe that place. You know, it's all so monolithic in terms
on one industry. It's a fairly simple business, and the people that run that
business are fairly simple, so it shows. I don't think anybody can manage to
live there with any complex thoughts at all unless he lives in total isolation.
It's a place to flee as soon as possible and of course, it is interesting now.
It is a phenomenon and I guess kind of interesting to a sociologist who wants
to study what happens in the industrial revolution and the fattening of the
bourgeoisie and so forth.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Well, how did you like it? Your father was an engineer. He was
sort of upper echelon.

ROBERT BREER: Yeah, we lived pretty well, I must say. Had this house on the
lake there. I was just vaguely aware of some  as aware one is at the age
of 16. Most of this is in retrospect. At the time there were a lot of instances
as far as we were concerned, I think not too much with the local society as
such. I think where we lived on the lake made for a lot of sports and a lot
of fishing, ice boating, swimming, and stuff of that sort. I wasn't interested
in engineering at all. I started out drawing at age five or something and I
was always encouraged  that's how I became an artist, by not being discouraged
but by finding something that was different from the others and it was reinforced
enough. I remember he took me to art school on Saturdays. He used to take me
to the local art school when I was about ten years old.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Do you remember what school that was?

ROBERT BREER: Yes, the Society of Arts and Crafts in Detroit. It was the only
school there. I don't know what is there now. I went back there when I was older
and a guy named Sarkesian  you know him?

PAUL CUMMINGS: I've heard of him.

ROBERT BREER: It is a famous name. I think there's a very well known rug 
it is Armenian, I guess. Anyhow, I did not have much interest and no particularly
ability either, no penchant for math and all that. It was very bad news because
when I went to Stanford it was understood that I was going to become an engineer.
I don't know how they understood it. I didn't understand it.

PAUL CUMMINGS: How did . . . ?

ROBERT BREER: Well, it was a crisis. I suppose because I guess I was indulged
in the art thing as long as I didn't take it too seriously. But it wasn't considered
a suitable career. I think it's as simple as that.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Nice as a child, but not . . . .

ROBERT BREER: Yeah, I think probably in certain circles it is all right. I
think that the artists that they might respect and admire would be the industrial
designers and such are considered beneath . . . . It is pretty much judged on
the basis of money-producing ability. Don't you think? Except that I don't want
to leave on the record that the old man was so much oriented that way. I think
he appreciated inventions and that's a thing in its own right. And I think some
of that rubbed off. There was a crisis when he asked me when I was being sent
to college right out of high school  and as I said, I was only 16. I was
going to go way out West on my own, which was kind of an alarming prospect for
me. He asked me what I was intending to major in and I said, well I didn't know.
And then was the only time I saw him almost lose control. He sensed that I didn't
know at this point what I was going to do. I apparently had overlooked that.

PAUL CUMMINGS: He knew what he wanted to do at that age.

ROBERT BREER: I guess that is right. I'm getting wiser, as Mark Twain, you
know, vis-a-vis parents. He frightened me into becoming, at least in the beginning,
an engineer. That didn't last long.

PAUL CUMMINGS: What kind of schools had you gone to in Detroit?

ROBERT BREER: I started out in a Catholic school. My mother is Catholic. My
father had a little German thing. My mother was half German and half Irish.
Her mother was from Canada some place and spent a little time in Upper Michigan
and so you know, if the church will have it you are a Catholic.

PAUL CUMMINGS: I know about the way they operate.

ROBERT BREER: You know how they operate. If there is one Catholic in the family
they are all Catholic or it's hell's fire and so forth. And so my first was
downtown Detroit. We hadn't yet moved out to the suburbs and I was sent to a
parochial school. Is that the right word for it? I've never understood what
parochial mens except provincial; I always thought as in the parishes. I guess
it was a big Catholic school I went to and I don't know how long it was for.
I ran away from it several times; the police would bring me home. I hated it.
They were sadistic and the nuns used  I checked this out with other rebellious
Catholics and it used to be standard procedure and they were always sadistic.
Are you enjoying all this? I'm surprised all this is coming out. You're a very
good interviewer with just the right attitude.

PAUL CUMMINGS: What about the time that you were in that school? What was that,
from first grade to . . . .

ROBERT BREER: I don't know. It must have been kindergarten and first grade.
Something like that. I pleaded with my mother not to send me back to that torture,
and she agreed. I went from that to whatever other school where they actually
played and cut out paper dolls. It was euphoric. It was incredible. I couldn't
believe it. The Catholic school made you sit and raise your hand to go to the
bathroom but nine times out of ten they wouldn't allow that to happen so I remember
a mixture of urine and corduroy, corduroy knickers that I wore and bleak five-thirty
chapel things in church, being terrified of all this. That was the way it worked
at the beginning of my life. I had to work out a lot of those things later with
the church and so forth. It haunted me for along time. I was about 12 when I
made the formal declaration of no more church, that I didn't believe in God.
I had read Sinclair Lewis  was it Main Street? In any case, I had heard
about him standing up and defying God and telling him to strike him dead if
there had been one. And that seemed to suit me fine. He survived that and I
tried it myself and it seemed to work. So I went downstairs and announced to
the family that I didn't believe in God and I wasn't going to go through this
hypocrisy any longer. And there was a great hush and from that time on I think
I had a certain moral space around me. My brothers came to me to plead with
me to reconsider. My mother from then on never really could face the situation.
She would pretend that she just misunderstood me. I never went to church after
that. Now my father was a self-styled atheist  he must have been Lutheran,
German I suppose but he never  and in this case he was probably on the
spot and couldn't really openly defend me and he didn't. But that was important
announcement of independence.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Did you have access to books to read? Were there books at home,
cultural interests, music? With the German background there should be music
somewhere.

ROBERT BREER: My father was a heavy that way. I think acultural. I don't know
how he got through school. I am sure he was a good student in the areas that
interested him and he had funny ranging interests. But he took a course from
William James, who was teaching at Stanford, believe it or not. He audited a
course from William Jones but had nothing to say about it afterwards, only the
fact. But my father was a relatively old man by the time we ever talked about
these things and this was going way back in his memory and he lost track of
some of that. But he was strangely lopsided in his education. He couldn't express
himself very well in words. It was a most painful business. His letters were
always incredibly pompous. Comical. I'm trying to think who it sounded like
. . . . Anything official always had to be through a secretary or "as told
to." Not that he was crude, he wasn't an automobile mechanic  it
wasn't that so much as maybe it was a personal thing. I think it was partly
education lacks of some kind. He managed maybe to evade all the courses in culture
and literature or whatever, but what he did when he made a lot of money 
he must have had some kind of . . . . We moved into a better neighborhood and
in the middle thirties he bought a house from a man who was wiped out in the
crash and he must have made a killing of some kind then. It had a library with
many shelves with no books so he bought a complete library, I think probably
by the colors, just books to fill up the shelves. Because when we tried to unload
this library (we always had been impressed by the bindings) it turned out they
weren't worth much. There were a few special editions, mainly these pretentious
second and third editions with very ornate bindings. Complete works of Thackeray,
complete works of  but sometimes very bad things.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Did you read any of those books?

ROBERT BREER: Sure. When I was a kid I read all of Edgar Allen Poe and . .
. .

PAUL CUMMINGS: Why did he appeal?

ROBERT BREER: I illustrated Poe. They were terrible things. I have them somewhere.
I did that for the House of Usher, poster things. So I had some access. And
I guess at the school I went to after the Catholic business called the Detroit
University School, which was a private day school. Heavy stress on manual training,
sports, and the like, really a kind of nice school, a boys' school. Now it has
become an incredible plant, like Westchester High School or something. You know,
it was a brick building, the rudiments of the twenties and thirties, a lot of
playing fields.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Were you interested in sports and all those activities?

ROBERT BREER: Not really too much. Football. I ended up a kind of high school
football hero. I was too clumsy to do anything else.

PAUL CUMMINGS: That is pretty skillful, isn't it?

ROBERT BREER: No. Well, taking out aggression, I guess. Sure, it could be.
I wasn't really that skillful. I had not been playing the backfield; I was too
blind. I was just dynamic. But it was a pleasant experience. I guess after that
start anything would have been pleasant. So I didn't have any grievances with
my education.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Going out to Stanford when you were 16 was a little early, wasn't
it?

ROBERT BREER: Well, I skipped a grade of school. The school was small and I
think what happened was in the second grade that they didn't have any students
so they decided to cancel the second grade that year and put me in the third.
I think they did something like that. I know I didn't skip third grade. In any
case, I didn't get the multiplication tables down very well and that's what
probably queered my engineering career.

PAUL CUMMINGS: You couldn't do all those numbers. Well, how did you like Stanford?
Going halfway across the country to your new milieu or situation  did
that allow you to explode into something?

ROBERT BREER: I ran into a lot of social problems because the West Coast, like
the East Coast, has its own established social situation and the kids that were
local kids going to Stanford knew each other. They had already a system and
I felt very much like a hick, which I was I suppose, and this put a damper on
some of my social ambitions. And there was a kind of fraternity systems going
at that time; it was during the war, and half the fraternities had to close
down and there were a few that were left and I was expected to go into a fraternity.
If you could make it, that would give you a stab at better than nothing. There
were about two choice ones that the friends that I made out there went into
and I managed to be on the tail end of that trip and wasn't quite asked to go
to the most favored one there, and it was a kind of a devastating blow to me.
I got offers to go to a couple of lesser ones but they seemed rather strange
to me and they were based on something that had to do with my being a football
player. I couldn't understand that that was worth anything. I was too small
to play college football. I went out for freshman team and went right back in
again. And so the only way to handle that situation was to turn against it,
which I did. I decided that fraternities were all for the birds and I managed
to handle that situation all right so that I wasn't wiped out. I have never
changed my mind about that. Then, I guess I suddenly, I started drawing cartoons
for the daily paper.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Had you continued drawing from the age of five all the way through
school?

ROBERT BREER: Yeah, I drew all the time. It was kind of uncouth. Grosse Pointe
was really on the city limits. Where Detroit turns into Grosse Pointe, at the
end of this street there is a little art supply store. The man who owned it
painted genre paintings there  dogs, playing cards and smoking pipes and
wearing hats and all that, and landscapes, Vermont snow, fir trees, like mashed
potatoes, but that was my introduction to art. I really didn't have much . .
. . The Arts and Crafts School was a little more sophisticated than that but
that wasn't such a heavy dosage that I escaped all the effects. So what I saw
around me was automobile designs or cartoons, and I guess I was always a fun
kid too. Humor was a way of dealing with my problems with family and so forth.
So I cartooned and that sort of appealed to me abstractly as a nice way to make
a living because one could stay home. We banned sororities at Stanford. I don't
think they have ever come back. The reason was because it was such a system
of elitism that the girls that didn't get in one were so many that it was an
unacceptable situation. There were too many crushed psyches.

PAUL CUMMINGS: How did you like living away from your family and making your
way in a new world? You didn't have any friends who went there, did you?

ROBERT BREER: No, I didn't know a soul and that was kind of disturbing in a
way. I did quite well in establishing myself as somebody there as a freshman,
part of it through this cartooning and part of it as  well, I don't know,
I was elected to some kind of class officership and so forth. I don't know how
I did it, charm I guess. It was important. I suffered great loneliness out there
and I really ended up hating the school and carried that feeling ever since.
I had a different experience. I went into the army finally and spent two years
in the army.

PAUL CUMMINGS: When was that?

ROBERT BREER: '45 to '47. It was right after the war had ended. I was drafted.
I wasn't fit for military service before. I was about to flunk out of Stanford
at that point. I had been in the art school and doing very well there. It was
like swimming in water.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Who did you study with there?

ROBERT BREER: Well, who could one mention in the Stanford Art Department that
anybody had ever heard of? I had a curious experience there. The two main professors,
one was Daniel Mendelowitz.

PAUL CUMMINGS: A drawing man.

ROBERT BREER: Is he a drawing man?

PAUL CUMMINGS: He did a book on drawings. It is quite good.

ROBERT BREER: Is it? Good.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Academic, quiet little drawings.

ROBERT BREER: He was a friend of the New York - again, I use the words genre
painter, I don't know what you call them. Who painted a famous painting, drawing,
that was titled High Yella, and it was a Harlem street light?

PAUL CUMMINGS: Reginald Marsh?

ROBERT BREER: Reginald Marsh, right. Mendelowitz was a friend of Reginald Marsh's
and had some of the same leanings. He was an intelligent man, and I liked him.
However, he was only interested in drawings of Reginald Marsh. The other man
that was in our department was named Victor Arnautoff. He was kind of interesting.
He's dead now. Another man's name was Farmer. All of them were realist painters.
Arnautoff had been a white Russian who escaped across China and married the
daughter of the Russian counsel in Peking or something. He went to Mexico and
was very impoverished in the '20's sometime after the revolution in Russia.
He stood around and admired Rivera and hung around so much that Rivera finally
gave him a bucket of plaster. He became Rivera's assistant, and he became an
expert muralist.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Muralist?

ROBERT BREER: Muralist or what you call a fresco painter and got appointed
to the Stanford faculty and in the meantime became a red. So a white Russian
became red. He became a communist and joined the party probably through Rivera,
I don't know. In the McCarthy era afer I'd left Stanford, there was some purge
in all the California faculties, and they did something to him that was disgusting,
that whole business. They demolished his career, and it rushed him into his
grave. He was sort of a neo-realist, Russian style painter and Mendelowitz.
Farmer, as I remember, spent days and days on super realist still lifes that
were on his desk all the time. That was the bent of the art department when
a new man was brought into Stanford from Cranbrook Academy or some place like
that who had a higher post in humanities that included art, but he had a higher
post than these people in the art department when I came back out of the Army.
In the Army, I was hauled out of basic training several times to do things like
paint "Headquarters Company" in old English on garbage cans. I was
used as an artist, and I finally got into a training aids department and was
used as a kind of commercial artist. We had a big silk screen session and made
posters . . .

PAUL CUMMINGS: Whereabouts were you in the Army?

ROBERT BREER: . . . how to defuse bombs. I ended in Fort Jackson, South Carolina.
I went all through the South. By then, I was regular army, and it was miserable.
I was a dog-face. I did a hell of a lot of KP pots and pans. I was in basic
training four times because every time they would haul me out because I had
two years of college. They would haul me out and give me a desk job, and then
somebody would look through my records and find I hadn't finished basic training.
Then, I would go back to basic training, and they would haul me out again to
do another job. But I ended up in this art department at Fort Jackson, and I
began to get a little status. I had three stripes, and they offered me a commission.
If you can imagine that. The last thing I wanted to do. It gave me a complete,
thorough disgust with commercial art and anything associated with it. I didn't
know anything else, I had developed, I guess, a tremendous yearning for anything
else, and I had what amounted to a religious revelation when I got out of the
Army towards fine art. I went back to Stanford very reluctantly. I just didn't
know what else to do. I had the GI Bill, and so I went back there.

PAUL CUMMINGS: How much original art in terms of fine art had you seen up to
this time?

ROBERT BREER: Everyone at Stanford was confined to what they considered . .
. . I took an art history course which probably took me up to possibly Paul
Klee.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Had you been to the Museum in Detroit?

ROBERT BREER: Yeah. Now a couple of things happened, I don't know at what time.
I have been listening to these goddamn Watergate hearings, so I have the feeling
that I have got to say everything truthfully.

PAUL CUMMINGS: On the third of July 1953 at two o'clock.

ROBERT BREER: I feel like saying things like "at that point in time."
I don't know. But, a couple of things happened in Detroit, and I don't know
when they happened, before or after the Army. One of them was a Matisse painting
of a window, goldfish on a table, called "The Window." There are many
windows and many goldfish so I am not sure which one, but it was a splendid
piece. That excited me for years. I still conjure up those first feelings. They
were very strong. That was very important for me. There was a man named Tannerhill,
who was a big collector, a relative of Ford somehow, who had just died recently,
and he bequeathed his collection to the Museum. They built a new wing for it,
and he had a fantastic collection. And, there was a lady in Detroit whose son
was a friend of mine, and she was a bright woman, Isabel Finnie. She was a printer
out of Chicago Institute way back, and, anyhow, she represented one of the intellectuals,
and their family was the bright light in an otherwise very dreary scene. The
time I spent with them was very stimulating, and she had gotten me to visit
this guy's collection. I remember he had a small dog that latched his nose on
the cuff of my pants and stayed with me the two hours I went around this collection,
but it didn't seem to bother him at all. But anyhow he had the Picasso white
period, he had Cezanne. By this time I knew what I was looking at from my art
history courses so this must have been after the war. I got very turned on anyhow.
I went back to school and took the standard art courses. I took time in the
afternoon, started painting abstractions and left one of them in the classroom.
The next day in Armantoff's class, figure painting class, he turned this thing
around from the wall and asked who did it, and I confessed. That started a whole
chain of events.

PAUL CUMMINGS: What was the reaction?

ROBERT BREER: He was very hostile, and he took me into his office and looked
funny at me. He thought that I had some special merit and was concerned that
I would get interested in what he considered evil, and we spent three hours,
him trying to persuade me to recant and not get interested in this stuff. Of
course, that made it more interesting. And, the other teachers likewise, and
the only man who came to my rescue was the new head of the humanities department,
Ray, I should remember his name much more sophisticated I always thought than
these people and at the same time he seemed to have less. I remember his less
vividly. I didn't have much to do with him, but he arranged it so I could quit
all my courses. He gave me a faculty studio in an old building, and all I had
to do for the last two years was take a couple of courses outside of art. All
I had to do was paint. A young faculty member named John LaPlatte didn't know
what was happening and would come once a week just to check on me, and we would
shoot the breeze for an hour or so. Then, he would go away, and I would go on
painting. I did all kinds of experimentation; it was very orthodox experimentation
at that time. I went through everything I had ever seen.

PAUL CUMMINGS: But when you started painting, you started painting abstractly
then? Or had you stared doing figure paintings?

ROBERT BREER: Oh no, I started difuratively. I started in school. I did still
lifes and figurative at the art school in Detroit.

PAUL CUMMINGS: I mean in the University situation.

ROBERT BREER: The University was figurative. In fact, the system was to go
from drawings to watercolor to oil. This was the standard progression, presumably
getting more deeply involved, and that was the orthodoxy. First draw from nature,
and develop your skills. They made open fun of my work. Mendelowitz kidded me
about my abstract paintings. Yeah, I was kind of offended.

PAUL CUMMINGS: There were no traveling exhibitions around?

ROBERT BREER: I saw a show of Mondrian's paintings in San Francisco, and that
knocked me out. That knocked me out and perplexed me. I couldn't reconcile that
with what I had been told. Again, I lose this time thing, but Paul Klee impressed
me very much. And, you know how kids learn then and probably still do, maybe
less because it was more mobile, but my art history course took place in a huge
auditorium at the University at the end of which was a screen, and slides were
shown. Mendelowitz was teaching. I saw Paul Klee on a screen the size of Lincoln
Center, and I was completely floored when I saw the first Paul Klee the right
size. That is a case where the scale is very important. Less important in other
cases, less discrepancy so I don't know. It is only in retrospect that my art
education was pretty sketchy.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Were there any students around there that you remember, that
you were interested in?

ROBERT BREER: Yeah, there were three. Two guys like myself who became mavericks,
and so we identified with each other. One of them is now a faculty member at
UCLA. He is a sculptor, and his name will come to me sooner or later. The other
one's name was Wilson. He lives in San Francisco, and he has got strange problems.
He is a very handsome guy. He had all kinds of problems. We had a girl friend
in common, and he lived off campus and was kind of a guru for the art students
there. I had a kind of different situation; I am not the guru type, but nevertheless,
I had that kind of special status too. He is a very good with animals. He does
certain orientalism in his work, animal stuff. He had a kind of very small but
deep reputation out there, but he has terrible drinking problems and other things
too. And, he's very self-destructive. What the hell is his last name? First
name I don't know. And the other guy, I will think of his name. There was another
boy. I think the other one is one the faculty at UCLA, and I cannot think of
his name. I had a catalog if I could find it.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Oliver Andrews?

ROBERT BREER: Yeah, he's on the faculty at UCLA. He does water sculptures with
fountains with slabs of metal, and water bubbles out of them. But, Wilson was
an interesting guy. We didn't work alike or anything so there wasn't any group.
It was just a very poor art school. What was really going on was at Berkeley
or at Cal. School of Fine Arts. Sam Francis was up there. I was out of touch
with them.

PAUL CUMMINGS: That whole group of people still was teaching there.

ROBERT BREER: Imagine I was that close to it, but no one told me. I didn't
know.

PAUL CUMMINGS: There was no communication?

ROBERT BREER: No, it was probably my fault, but you know.

PAUL CUMMINGS: So you finished at Stanford and got a BA in '49.

ROBERT BREER: Yeah.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Then you went to Paris? Why did you decide to do that?

ROBERT BREER: I was going to New York, and I just kept going. I had a friend
who was going to Paris so I went over there as a tourist. Again, I had the GI
Bill. I had accumulated three years of it, and so when I got over there I signed
up for that. I got a small stipend from home. I lived on that GI Bill for a
couple of years $75 a month plus books that we could sell. We had a book allowance.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Yes, I remember.

ROBERT BREER: I know people who were on it, and they used to get books, run
across the street, and sell them. And of course, we didn't go to school. I didn't
go to school even a little bit then. We just signed up in the school.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Who'd you go to?

ROBERT BREER: Grande Chaumiere. You know Paris? Well, you know Montparnasse.
Collarissi was the next one. A sculptor Zadkine. I went there for three weeks.
I had an encounter with Zadkine, and I left. It was funny. I had a friend, George
Spaventa, you know?

PAUL CUMMINGS: Oh yes, sure.

ROBERT BREER: George was studying with Zadkine. I don't remember what I said
to him.

PAUL CUMMINGS: You hadn't made sculpture before?

ROBERT BREER: No. I went into the class, and we worked with clay. There was
a model, and I did a small perfectly well done nude. The only thing special
about it was the kind of surface held together by skin rather than bones, maybe
it was legitimate criticism. When he got around to me, he suggested that I do
a formal anatomy study of a plaster cast. I wasn't about to do it. As far as
I was concerned, I was much further than that. The piece of sculpture I had
done was a straightforward copy, but the idea of going back to the plaster form
was out of the question. I said that I really didn't have time, and he said
what are you doing in the afternoons. I said I paint, and he pretended to be
horrified by this. And he said well, you have to make up your mind. So I did;
I quit his class, and that was the end of that. I saw Zadkine around all the
time. His prize student was Bob Bazinsky. Never heard of him after that. He
was a painter. He was picked up by Life magazine. Funny how we thought . . .
he was a competent what would be expressionist fauve.

PAUL CUMMINGS: How did you like that milieu in Paris with the GI's running
all over?

ROBERT BREER: Well, I liked it very much. There was a lot of heavy drinking
and a lot of feeling of . . . . Well, people have said of all the guys there
that I was the only one who worked all the time. That has been said of me, so
I can repeat it. It might have been true. Most of the people that we knew were
kind of going to public baths, taking a bath, doing laundry, buying bread. The
way of life was . . .

PAUL CUMMINGS: How did you like living with the French language? French people?
Parisians?

ROBERT BREER: Oh, well, eventually, I got to sort of cordially despise the
French, but in the process, I learned the language. I do have a few very dear
likeable French friends. Exceptions in general. No, that isn't really quite
true. I lived there for ten years, five years of which I was married to an American.
All sorts of life became more and more involved with expatriate Americans, and
I found that kind of tedious. There was too small a selection. The art seemed
again to drift to New York.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Were you aware of that then?

ROBERT BREER: Well, I became aware of it in the middle fifties or so. I had
a few American painter friends. Jack Youngerman was over there.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Who else was there?

ROBERT BREER: There was a guy named Leo Zimmerman who someday will be dug out
of his home in Kentucky, I guess, because he was quite an amazing guy. Jack,
Leo and myself were shown with six other artists at Denise René. I could
look up the catalogue. In '50 or so. I have a René biography at the Yale
show. They put together a thing. Have you seen that? Anyhow, as for other Americans
over there: I didn't know Ellsworth Kelly. Jack knew him quite well. It is funny
that we never met. Oh, there was that guy John Koenig who ran - I don't know
- is he still functioning at his gallery?

PAUL CUMMINGS: Yeah. Cimaise.

ROBERT BREER: I'll be damned. I haven't seen him for years.

PAUL CUMMINGS: He just had a show in Washington. I got a little announcement.

ROBERT BREER: You know him?

PAUL CUMMINGS: Through correspondence.

ROBERT BREER: Most of the people I knew I got involved with through Denise
René.

PAUL CUMMINGS: How did that happen? She had been in business for a little while
by that time, hadn't she?

ROBERT BREER: Oh, yes, she started in '45. I was there in '49. Edgar Pillet,
who was one of her stable at that time, was a friend of Leo's, and they were
in the popcorn business together.

PAUL CUMMINGS: In the popcorn business?

ROBERT BREER: Yeah, yeah, he was very successful for a while selling popcorn
in France. He had three street stands, and then he sold it in packages. He had
a farmer growing it. People were stealing from him. They passed a law prohibiting
a machine that high on the pavement, and the other businessmen cleaned them
out. He was a funny guy. That's a Leo Zimmerman, the painter. His wife worked
for ECA, the Marshall Plan, as some of these people did who were supported by
their wives.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Who were you married to then? You didn't mention it.

ROBERT BREER: My connection with Denise René came through her sister
Lucienne. I wasn't married but might as well have been. I got officially married
in 1955 to my present wife back here in New York. I came back here on a visit,
and I looked her up. I had met her in Paris before. She used to work for Arnold
Fawcus Press. Do you know anything about that?

PAUL CUMMINGS: Yes.

ROBERT BREER: He did things like Piranesi books and Huxley. I remember going
to lunch with Huxley because I had a little car, and he used my car. I always
had wheels of some kind. So, a complicated story. But Denise René and
the painters I saw most of were Vasarely, all of those people, Mortenson, Deyrolle.
Those names mean anything to you?

PAUL CUMMINGS: Yes. Deyrolle is dead, I think.

ROBERT BREER: Deyrolle is dead? Hard to believe.

PAUL CUMMINGS: I think I heard that.

ROBERT BREER: Dewasne had a show. You know that. He's not well know here at
all. In Europe at the time they were the stars, and I was kind of their young
American mascot. I was the only American in the gallery, the youngest artist
there. When I got married, it dawned on me how intermingled my private life
and my professional life were. I was about to have my first one-man show at
Denise René as a big send off. I was first to have a show in Brussels,
which I did have at the Museum there. When I went back before that show to New
York, it caused some hostility in the René family and a switch in my
career. I was no longer with the Denise René Gallery. I've seen her since;
everything is fine. She just bought a bunch of my things, in fact.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Oh really? Good.

ROBERT BREER: [Inaudible] creepy crawlies.

PAUL CUMMINGS: How did you find being associated that way with the French gallery?
Because not many Americans have had French gallery associations.

ROBERT BREER: Well, I can't blame them. I didn't see Americans. I saw these
people. They weren't French; they were Europeans in general. So I didn't even
speak English from one year to the next very often. I had American friends over
there, but it was another life, another world. I was really away. I came back
here after I got married here, and then I began to make more American connections.
When the big swinging show went to France, that was the death knell on the French
art scene. I was pretty much out of it by then, in a sense. I had one more show
at the American Students Artist Center. It was the first show that they had
had, and I don't think anything since then because it is more of an art gallery.
I don't know recently what has happened to it. And, I started making films,
and there was a lot of interest in my films.

PAUL CUMMINGS: How did the films start? You had been painting the kind of flat
geometric  not really geometric, overlapped images.

ROBERT BREER: Well, I don't know. The first film I made was 1952. I guess I've
answered that question several ways but I really don't know what the right answer
is.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Was it through somebody? Were you interested in motion pictures?

ROBERT BREER: No, I wasn't. I think it was kineticism. I think it was, I don't
know. I really can't honestly say what the influence was, but I know the first
film I made was  you didn't see it. They don't have these films at the
Museum at all. They don't have any of them. The Anthology Archives has them.
They were like these paintings you saw, geometric forms involving very crude
animated films, like Mickey Mouse but without personalities. The first thing
I did was to make a flip book. Now my father comes back into this picture because
one of his major hobbies was film making.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Oh, really.

ROBERT BREER: Yeah, home movies. In 1940, I think it was, here or at the World's
Fair in '39 or '40, the Chrysler Company commissioned some people to make a
three-dimensional film for their pavilion at the World's Fair and it was one
of these red and green power-house spectacle types of things. And that stirred
my old man to do the same thing, only he decided to use color film. And he knew
Ed Land, who was the Polaroid guy at the time. I guess he had just come out
with Polaroid glass and put together  I have it right in my bag there,
his camera made in 1940. From then on all our home movies were made in 3-D.
When we went down to the basement to look at home movies, we had to wear glasses
and there was a long business of adjusting it so it was right and you couldn't
tilt you head or it would distort. So that was all in there. Movies were one
of the more excruciating things to do. A good way to spoil an evening is to
have to go and look at home movies  it always is and in three dimensional
didn't make it that much better. I had an aversion to film, really, if anything.
But I knew he had a camera, so in '52 I guess I was planning a visit back to
the States and anticipated borrowing a camera from him and made this bunch of
drawings that would be for the first film. I went home and I did use that camera.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Had you studied animation or drawing, film techniques or anything?

ROBERT BREER: No, it was really shooting blind. I had notions about it but
not much. I might have looked at one of these manuals how-to-do-it, but those
things have always disgusted me because of the little dull stick figures that
they use and because of the general commercial, dreary . . . .

PAUL CUMMINGS: What kind of films did you father make?

ROBERT BREER: Long epic travelogues, his travels. My mother advancing towards
the camera holding a flower, kind of Kodak award-winning amateur studies of
trees with ice on them, really corny home movies. He did all the things that
you were supposed to do in the manual. He used slow motion when you're in a
car so the camera jolts were dampened and he occasionally would use some of
the tricks, reversing, turning the camera upside down, so you have somebody
coming out of the swimming pool into the diving board, you know. But really
very little of that. Most of it was just in the interest of recording travels
and so forth. Very steadily composed. I don't know how I'd see them now. We
have it all stored, thousands of feet, three-dimensional movies. Hollywood people
were interested in them when they thought that 3-D was going to be big. Before
cinerama or before cinemascope became the standard, there was an attempt right
after the war to use it. Well, I guess it was a switch over to the mechanistic
and didn't seem justifiable. They were threatened by television and looking
for something. My father was convinced that the movies that were made to promote
3-D were so abominable that it turned everybody against three dimension. So
up until he died he thought still that 3-D movies would find their proper place.
He consulted the Bolex people and tried to persuade them to get interested.
They did make up a 3-D thing, didn't find many people interested, and dropped
it. For me it provoked all kinds of negative thoughts about pursuing realism
in general, you know, which I already had but even more so then and questioned
why one should do it. But occasionally I was curious about what one could do
and how one could use it other than simply trying to recreate what you were
looking at, transport it someplace. And then I got philosophical. Somewhere
I wrote something  there is an interview for Film Culture, a couple of
interviews.

PAUL CUMMINGS: One thing I am curious about. When you went to France you were
painting abstractly already and you continued that way. So the classes that
you went to there were just . . . .

ROBERT BREER: Oh, the classes there. I never went to a class. This would get
me in trouble with the Federal Government, but I painted in my hotel room. In
the winter it was very cold but that was where I worked. I never painted a single
thing in a class under anybody's tutelage in France. No, they were doing figure
stuff. The Grand Chaumière was like peeling away fifty or seventy years,
still 1900, and the Detroit school was more advanced in many ways than that
so I had no interest. Besides all the painters for me were all those people
around Montparnasse  all these people who were still living you would
see from time to time. The biggies, you know. Giacommetti was always around
there.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Did you find those people accessible? Did you meet many of the
established artists?

ROBERT BREER: Oh yeah, I did through Denise René, but I didn't seek
it out. I had all my own pretensions you know. I lived in the same building
that Léger had a studio in for a while. I got to know Corbusier quite
well because he was with Denise René. I got to know Arp quite well. I
was a great admirer of Arp. And I had a chance to meet Picasso a couple of times
and didn't take it because I knew I would just stand there with egg on my face.
I had a chance to go over to his studio on business with Denise but I just didn't
feel like it. You know, it is an American attitude . . . . So I missed opportunities.
I don't know whether I regret it or not.

PAUL CUMMINGS: There were enough other ones.

ROBERT BREER: There were enough others. Yeah, I got the idea. Like Brancusi
lived around, he lived right next door to Tinguely. And of course Tinguely and
I got to be close friends.

[END TAPE ONE, SIDE ONE]

[BEGIN TAPE ONE, SIDE TWO]

PAUL CUMMINGS: So the first films were really started in Paris? And concurrently
with the paintings?

ROBERT BREER: Yeah, and I gradually tapered off from painting. I was disturbed
by  I guess disturbed, I don't know  anyhow, my first abstract painting
in Paris, I had done a few attempts I guess at Stanford, but mainly it was still
abstract in the American sense of the word, the real first neo-plastic paintings.
You know the way this happens, you have interviewed enough artists so you know,
is that I suppose the most obvious direct influence is the least obvious to
that person being influenced. So my first pure abstract paintings were certainly
influenced by Mondrian, but I cannot trace, you know. I told you that I had
seen the show in California but it was so many years before. It had left such
a vague impression. Anyhow, it was a turning point for me and I guess I went
through the throes that Kandinsky went through when in 1913 it became a revelation
that abstraction was possible. I got very excited and that was probably in 1950
or something, a few months after I had been in Paris and my friends got Denise
René over to look at my stuff. Those were the people that came to look
at it and they got interested and they made up this group show and I showed
in that, and picked up a few of their collectors there, very few. That is the
way that happened. What did you ask me?

PAUL CUMMINGS: Well, the painting tapered off.

ROBERT BREER: Okay, so then my painting I think went into a less original phase
for a while under the influence of Vasarely and  I see it now, I didn't
see it then  neo-plasticism. Mangelli was a big important guy. Herbin
became an important person. Herbin was very stimulating to me. Way back in 1950
it was rare to see those things and well, he had a good period at the time for
me, the less serpentine figures, very simple, geometric forms.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Simple?

ROBERT BREER: The simplest. So that was the influence then. Now I felt that
I was working my way out of the very rigid notions that a lot of these people
had. The Denise René group used to meet in my apartment occasionally
and they had the close knit group  most of them were communists, strangely
enough, and Denise's brother was secretary of the Trotsky Party, Jacobsen the
sculptor. It's funny he isn't that well known, but through that period he was
the important young sculptor at that time. But most of these guys were in their
forties. I was in my twenties. Mortensen, another Dane, Jacobsen. Anyhow they
had an ideological falling out a few years after I got tied up with them in
the gallery and they had a meeting in which they regretfully acknowledged that
they were all becoming successful and that they were splitting away from each
other because they couldn't share the same ideology. They weren't really a group
any longer. And I remember sitting there as a witness to this and it seemed
kind of devastating that the thing was crumbling.

PAUL CUMMINGS: To you?

ROBERT BREER: Seemed devastating to me just as a witness, especially because
I was associated with some kind of dying scene, you know. I regretted that I
wasn't really one of those guys. They were really quite successful. Denise René
comes through, you know. She was the gallery. She was Leo Castelli of Paris.
Paris was supposedly the place. This was important. But anyhow, that happened.
I became disenchanted with some of their orthodoxies. I couldn't believe all
this crap about avoiding configuration. It seemed to me strangely unnecessary.
Some of the absolutism I couldn't buy and one way out was kinetics.

PAUL CUMMINGS: How did you like being the youngest artist of all these people
and being the only American in a European group?

ROBERT BREER: It seemed natural to me. I think I didn't have any connection
with the American art scene when I left America so I wasn't tearing anything
up. I didn't have very much of a point of view when I got there so I think I
became Europeanized.

PAUL CUMMINGS: You sort of were beginning.

ROBERT BREER: It didn't occur to me. I didn't feel like an American so much
until afterwards, after I had been there a few years and after I had married
an American and after I found myself with Americans more. I became a kind of
professional American and I didn't care for that. But at that time I was just
one more foreigner there. They were all foreigners too. We all had our language
problems. With the Danes we used English as a common language sometimes, or
French, so I don't think I felt that American. I had nothing to identify with.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Vasarely's Hungarian.

ROBERT BREER: Hungarian, yeah.

PAUL CUMMINGS: What was the Denise René Gallery like?

ROBERT BREER: Well, it was a very tight ship.

PAUL CUMMINGS: She has a very specific aesthetic.

ROBERT BREER: Well, I never understood that she has a specific aesthetic. I
always felt that it was Vasarely using her. She became a kind of oracle 
or was it the other way around. I know she always had  I never felt that
her aesthetic convictions were all that personal. She is a very strong woman,
little, but she is small and dynamite. I think she worked out convictions, but
I think that her convictions were more female intuition, good political sense
and so forth, rather than any deep sensed kind of aesthetic attachment to .
. . .

PAUL CUMMINGS: Well, she's a good merchandiser too.

ROBERT BREER: Exactly. I think that she got her aesthetic input from the people
around her and Vassarely was a major influence on her, to the disgruntlement
of the other artists. We always felt that he had too much to say about what
was going on and choice of other artists and so forth. There was some resentment.

PAUL CUMMINGS: But he had always been so apparent in her galleries, the manifestations
of her gallery.

ROBERT BREER: Yeah, well, he is the big star of her gallery. It is almost as
if she were working for him. They were, of course, very close anyhow and I think
they were together when the gallery started. It's all intertwined.

PAUL CUMMINGS: You have made quite a number of films, sort of one or two a
year, one after another, all being made in Paris. You did live there for the
decade. What do these derive from? Were they still associated with the images
of the paintings?

ROBERT BREER: Well, I worked out of that and just got interested in film per
se. I guess I gradually became acquainted with the whole experimental film movement,
you know, and I identified myself with that. I do now anyhow. This Englishman
just sent me an early Ruttman film. I don't know whether you know him, his work,
but simultaneous with Richter. In fact there is some question about who was
first, Eggling or Richter. There is some question about  Richter's still
alive  anyhow, there is an area of doubt in there. Those questions being
very important in those days, less important now of who did what when. But Ruttman
was well known in Europe and a successful commercial film maker. I think he
did titles and things for people and special effects in Germany and made some
 they are called Opus 1, 2, 3, 4 or something like that. Abstract geometric
films very much like Richter's films, more suave I guess, a little more accomplished
technically and so forth in the middle twenties. And so I was aware of these
people, gradually became aware of them anyhow: Leger, Duchamp, Man Ray, all
of their activities. The whole Dada thing interested me and so film was a natural.
I mean, it also was in an area  well, I suppose others were more interested
in what I was doing in film than in my paintings so that might have pulled or
pushed me in that direction. One is susceptible to that. It is hard to measure.
I got very excited just dealing with this material. So I could  it's very
exciting business. One of the things that also interested me was the idea of
reproduction. The fact that one painting . . . . I had sold a few paintings
and they disappeared and they're gone and I was excited about that  they
were never seen again by me. And in that whole area I have a lot of notions
like that that I think are more rationalizations than anything else. But anyhow,
there was a lot of effort to make multiples in those days that fell short of
being acceptable, you know, and there was a painter, a protegé of MIro's
 what was his name  who talked a lot about this and tried to . .
. .

PAUL CUMMINGS: Spoerri was one of them.

ROBERT BREER: No, not Spoerri, he was no protegé of Miro's.

PAUL CUMMINGS: I know, I couldn't think.

ROBERT BREER: No, no, this man was an older French painter and I don't remember.
It's not Talcoat. I can't remember his name but he had a show of paintings that
were very similar one to the next and it was a kind of philosophical effort
to pose the question of multiplicity versus the one original act. It was in
the air and I thought, my god, film, here it is and the original is worthless.
It's always prints of that and the prints themselves don't have value except
as they're shown on the wall, so I got interested in that. In escaped the usual
route of collectors' anility and so forth adding artificial value to things
because of their uniqueness. And so that philosophically was tempting. Then
also, film opened up a new public for me and that public wasn't subject to the
same, you know, . . . .

PAUL CUMMINGS: Whims, rules.

ROBERT BREER: Rules, right. Limitations as the art public, so I felt freer.
So when I got into the film public they weren't  in many cases they were
louts. You know, they knew my relative sophistication and then they'd get lost
in a film world and so I found myself between a couple of chairs there.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Did you know Kenneth Anger in Paris?

ROBERT BREER: I didn't know . . . . Anger and Brakhage and all those people
I met in 1958 at the Brussels Experimental . . . .

PAUL CUMMINGS: You didn't know them before?

ROBERT BREER: No, I don't think I even saw their films. That was how we met
each other. They came over.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Richard Roud? Any of those people?

ROBERT BREER: I met Richard through, what is his name, Stein? Elliot Stein.
You don't know Elliot Stein?

PAUL CUMMINGS: It doesn't ring a bell.

ROBERT BREER: And Noel Burch. Do you know who Noel Burch is?

PAUL CUMMINGS: I've heard that name from somewhere.

ROBERT BREER: Well, he's here, he's here. He is an American who became a Frenchman.
He lived over there. He is a friend of Annette Michelson. You know Annette?

PAUL CUMMINGS: Yes.

ROBERT BREER: Annette sent him to see my films at the American Culture Center
and he became very involved with that. He ended up forming a film school in
Paris and writing for Cahiers du Cinema and television programs in France. He
is here teaching at NYU.

PAUL CUMMINGS: One thing that interests me is that since your films run from
a minute, minute and a half, to sixteen minutes and thereabouts, what was your
idea of how they would be exhibited or shown to people? Did you think of doing
a program of your films as part of other programs? Going into commercial theaters?

ROBERT BREER: Well, that was a painful problem and still is.

PAUL CUMMINGS: How do you handle them in the world?

ROBERT BREER: Well, what beautifully has happened is that in this country there
is a new market for this kind of film that has grown in the last ten years to
a large proportion and that is the universities. Before that, Cinema 16 was
the one outlet for this kind of film and one place that was even aware of the
existence of this kind of film. In France there were two or three ciné
clubs where I was invited to show my films. There is one commercial theater,
Studio Parnasse, that put together experimental film programs. In that case,
we'd always be lumped together, and my films being short, they would have to
fill out the program, or I would fill out the program, whatever. I didn't' think
in terms of commercial distribution. Yes, I did. I thought gee why not at first,
and then gradually it dawned on me that that was a whole other world and that
the public at large would never be taken by my films. How it did happen finally
in this country briefly. I had one successful commercial run with "Last
Year at Marienbad" when that came here. A little film I made called "Man
and His Dog Out For Air." That ran for about nine months here exclusively
with that film which was the most heralded film of the year, and I guess the
most disappointing film, too. Do you remember when that arrived here? The Modern
Museum had five private screenings, it was a big thing, and little old me, my
film was chosen to run with this, a three minute film. and then the lights would
go up and then they went down and on would come Marienbad, you know. Well, I
was really incredulous, I guess. They'd stretched it to Cinemascope. I hadn't
had that kind of treatment ever. I was very impressed by myself. I enjoyed,
that but that was it as far as commercial runs go.

PAUL CUMMINGS: How had they found you? Who found you?

ROBERT BREER: Oh, it was Jonas Mekas and the Village Voice. There were screenings
downtown at Charles Cinema. There was a lot of noise being made about so-called
underground cinema during the early '60's, and every time it was investigated
by journalists and the people who like the idea and sound of it. For one thing,
the idea of films that were what you call X-rated films now, then they were
mildly so. Like Ken's films were sensational, and so there were commercial people
hanging around hoping to somehow capitalize on these . . . .

PAUL CUMMINGS: Oh, I see, and Jack Smith and all that.

ROBERT BREER: Jack Smith. I think my film, I don't know when it got tied up
with Marienbad. You would have to look up the dates but we had showings anyhow,
and there was a certain amount of noise around. And, there was a young girl
Ellie Silverman who became, I still think she is still, an agent. She picked
up that film and the Marienbad film. The theatre owners screened, I don't know,
X number of films, and Ellie Silverman slipped mine in with them and the usual
commercial shorts, and I guess it was different enough so they were tired at
the end of the day, I don't know. It got chosen. It was a fluke, I think, and
then they were pleased enough. I think the reaction was positive.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Well, they kept it for the whole run.

ROBERT BREER: I think it was the idea of avant-garde. They kept it in the theatre
for that run and she said the whole theatre could be turned over to me, and
I made a subsequent film which she didn't pick up on and now she is showing
. . . . That's a marginal enterprise. But when "Last Year at Marienbad"
left that theatre, whoever the people were that distributed that film dropped
"Man and His Dog," and they put much more commercial films with it.
I resisted becoming bitter and cynical. I had my moment of glory. That opening
night it was pretty good because I didn't know about it. I was out here at our
other little house we used to live in. The phone rang, and they said if you
can get into town there is an opening tonight at Carnegie Hall Cinema of "Last
Year at Marienbad," and your film is being shown. We raced into town and
sat down in the red plush seats flushed with various feelings and watched my
film come on. Afterwards, there was a long letter that arrived complaining about
how they stretched that film into Cinemascope  don't you have any more
respect than that for Breer's work and so forth, but I never answered the letter.
I was tickled pink to see it up there at all.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Well, in shifting it into Cinemascope did that change it for
you?

ROBERT BREER: No, that didn't bother me at all. You accept distortions. Once
the distortion is established  I think that is an important point in general
 that distortion, stretching it, is so quickly assimilated. It is such
a minor change, really. It is one shift that a human being so complex can quickly
accommodate.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Of course, they haven't seen it in normal.

ROBERT BREER: It wouldn't make any difference. I didn't really notice the difference.
It is an abstract film. There is only one little figure that shows up and it
is already so stylized that it doesn't make that much difference. It was really
kind of sweet. I thought it was beautiful seeing against the wall. Then the
scale always changes in film. You go from small to unknown size. Probably if
I had seen a closeup of that  and I think the brain and the eyes adjust
to all these things all the time. So Paul Klee painted a house as small as a
postage stamp. I don't think there is a difference between those two experiences
in that area. I think probably that Paul Klee distortion took place in the fact
that it was a projection of light in a dark room on the wall, whereas the thing
itself was intangible surface. I think that is probably where the biggest change
took place. Much more complex surface in the real thing than the projected image
of it, so the same thing there.

PAUL CUMMINGS: When did your sculpture start? How did that begin? Because there
is a curious kind of graphic quality in the films which seems to be related
to the way some of the early sculptures look and move.

ROBERT BREER: I tried to keep all these things connected just for my own sanity,
you know. So some of that is conscious, you know, from one thing to the next
and sculptures were earlier, before the floats. They're on wheels and move about.
Apparently I made some kinetic sculptures on the basis . . . .

PAUL CUMMINGS: With motors.

ROBERT BREER: Hand cranked motors. I had had aversion to motors as well as
film. I mean, I backed into all these areas, you know.

PAUL CUMMINGS: You seem to react against your background and then pick it up
and use it after a certain time.

ROBERT BREER: Yeah, I guess. I wonder if we all do that or if it's just me.
I think one might. I think rebellion might be a necessary distance-taking to
permit you to capitalize on the things that are already there. That's what happened
in my family. I had to back away from my old man and his long shadow to find
myself and so anything that was opposite to what he did would serve that purpose.
But once I got further away I could compare my shadow with his and then the
shadows were then basically the same thing. They had to do with combinations
and foundations and sensitivity in various area and so forth. So I ended up
identifying quite strongly with him, accepting the different areas that we worked
somehow in many ways. That doesn't sound like it makes any sense, but that is
how that works. What was the real question?

PAUL CUMMINGS: When did you start making the sculptural objects? You had stopped
painting at one point and just made films. Or did it all overlap like a three-layered
cake?

ROBERT BREER: Oh, I see. I left France. I was beginning to make what they called
"tachism" with great scorn. Denise René would never accept
Pollock. He was the thorn, you know, his approach and other painting like that
fell into the realm of what they called tachism. You know about tachism. It
means spotism and it was just about descriptive as cubism is. It doesn't mean
anything. Soft edge was the culprit, I guess, and that was one of Denise René's
kind of convenient orthodoxy. I don't know how many painters bought that hard
line, but Vasarely promoted it also for his own purposes so there is a big confusion.
Anything that was soft was immediately identified with a vast thing called tachism.
Actually, what Pollock was doing and Tobey and the few West Coast people had
more access, or vice-versa, the Europeans had more access to what they were
doing.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Well, Tobey was living in Europe.

ROBERT BREER: Tobey lived there and there were some connections with that kind
of lyricism like the other European painters.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Small scale and sort of wrist rather than the whole arm movement.

ROBERT BREER: Right, always a kind of earnest rejection of American expressionism;
the French at least couldn't accept that. Anyhow, they were all together as
tachists and in my painting I wanted to explore that area. Somehow I tried to
do something with my hard-edge geometry that would seem more American to me.
The show of 1955 I had in Brussels was completely misunderstood. I have a painting
right there. It was a slight switch, not going toward soft edge, but towards
a kind of much more floating geometry, a one-shot painting like a Rothko, Still
and so forth. I understood that and I was attracted to that. Those paintings
don't look like that but relatively they're in that direction. There I felt
my American-ness as against the Europeans and I wanted to turn it on them. They
show was a wipe-out as far as . . . . By that time I'd split with Denise and
I got going into film more. I think that was a turning point. The interest in
my film got me into film. The painting was headed out of the European school
but in no specific direction and by the time I moved back here I was really
only making films and I haven't painted since 1960, painting as such. Of course,
I do for the films. You saw 69 and 70?

PAUL CUMMINGS: Yes.

ROBERT BREER: Well, they had paintings. Those little images of course are dealing
with the same problems that I'd dealt with in those other paintings.

PAUL CUMMINGS: What caused you to come back here?

ROBERT BREER: I came back on regular visits, every two years or so, and came
back this time with my wife in '57. Anyhow, when I did Jamestown Blues, I did
that back here. We were at a cottage up in Rhode Island on the island up there,
near her family in Rhode Island.

PAUL CUMMINGS: What is her name, by the way?

ROBERT BREER: Francis, Franny. Last name Foote. And in that little cottage
on the bed springs . . . . I made a camera stand out of that and took the mattress
off during the day and made a film. I like to do that now, very primitive working
conditions. Keep my [inaudible] There's a challenge too. Well, film making is
so gimmicky that one can get lost in the . . . . I've always tried to clear
out all of the technical apparatus and make drawings or paintings or pictures
with simple means that will be absorbed by the cinema process somehow or other.
Technique is always secondary. So anyhow, I made a film there. Then I came back
on another visit, I guess in '59. I was looking around for some work for some
income. That was one of the problems. I was trying to promote a flipbook that
I'd made in 1955 that Denise René had helped me publish. She paid for
it, about 500 copies of that little book. Seen it? I probably only have one
copy. Okay, I came back to America hoping to get a publisher interested in making
a book like this. I went to Abrams, I went to Praeger, and my god, I don't know
who I went to. Was sent from one place to another and of course, they all said
this wasn't a book.

PAUL CUMMINGS: We can't sell it.

ROBERT BREER: We can't sell it. And there were some that were excited and others
that, you know, once in a while . . . . It took me a month or two. I finally
ended up in Long Island City with a guy who makes children's playing cards and
he persuaded me to animate the back of those playing cards for kids; he felt
that was an idea that would sell. I started working at that and we kept the
cottage in Rhode Island and I commuted back and forth and somebody gave us a
house up there and fall came. I'd never seen a New England fall and  Detroit,
California, Europe, I'd never seen anything like this. And it happened to be
a special one. Right on the bay up there and the trees all changed colors and
I went out of my mind. I'd never seen red, orange trees. I walked down an alleyway
to the house through this expressionist landscape, Fauve, too much. Really everything
happened to me then. Anything about America hit me so hard that it all came
back. After ten years in essence, you know, it came over me and I decided I
wanted to stay. It coincided with getting this little job I had and so I started
that. That was in '59 and '60.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Just one more thing about France. You had not lived in Paris
all the time, had you?

ROBERT BREER: Oh, yes.

PAUL CUMMINGS: I thought you were out in the country on occasion.

ROBERT BREER: No, I went out to the country, but . . . .

PAUL CUMMINGS: Did you travel around Europe much or not?

ROBERT BREER: Not a terrific amount, but I did those first years quite a bit.
I was off someplace  Spain, Italy, England  from time to time. I
did but less and less. I had a thing about working all the time since I was
always on vacation, in a sense, so the idea of just traveling for . . . . I'd
go where I had something to do.

PAUL CUMMINGS: You were in a number of film festivals. Did you find them interesting
or useful?

ROBERT BREER: Well, I'd have to remember which film festivals. I don't even
know. Couldn't have been very rewarding, huh?

PAUL CUMMINGS: Well, you know, some places you got awards.

ROBERT BREER: Yeah, I got awards sometimes. Being in the film festival means
the films weren't bad. Well, the only one that had any real impact was in 1958
at the Brussels Fair when we were invited . . . . Jack La Doux, who runs the
Cinematheque in Belgium, invited all these filmmakers there and we all met and
that was the basis, I think, of the beginning of the American underground film
group. Amos Vogel came over from Cinema 16. The British Film Institute bought
my films. And then there was a lot of fun there. We were all wined and dined
and were taken out to the chateaus, taken to the Gaevaert Film Factory and girls
came with tutus on and trays full of film. And cigars after lunch. And I took
all these boxes of film, stuffed my pockets with them, and when I got home I
found out they were 8 millimeter. So that was like an orgy of an ego trip in
1958. That's the only film festival that I ever  other things were, you
know, my participation was so tiny or I wasn't there. More recently, like the
Oberhausen Festival, I didn't go.

PAUL CUMMINGS: The films go and you don't anymore.

ROBERT BREER: Yeah, I don't. There are film festival openings once a week,
application forms. I don't send films anymore. I just don't bother. If someone
asks me specifically, okay, that's about the way I go. I don't know, I suppose
in the interest of self-promotion one should but I've had some pretty bitter
disappointments too. I've been turned down by festivals whom I felt were beneath
me and then, you know how that goes. Like Poland. They sent telegram after telegram
to send a film over there and we found it was a great amount of trouble to send
a film and then they sent me a notice back that it wasn't accepted. And then
the man who had seen the film, whoever that fellow was, was fired I guess, I
don't know. But things like that are an annoyance, you know.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Going back to the sculpture again  we seem to get sidetracked.

ROBERT BREER: Yeah, well that's what I do, I go back and forth. Sculpture.
In 1960 I came back here and I'd been making films. I found that the real public
for my films was the art public but that they had no access to them. The galleries
showed paintings and sculpture but not films. So I met with Jack Meyer 
do you know his gallery? He was running a gallery, somebody sent me to him and
he was agreeable to my showing films in his gallery. He was kind of interested
and the idea was different. And putting on a couple of programs  one of
contemporary films like mine and featuring my films and another was historical
going back over experimental film. And they were very successful, those two
programs. And I was very pleased. I wasn't with a gallery but at the same time
I felt that I was getting to that public I wanted to and also to have a cinema
bridge. I've always felt that making a connection . . . . I don't know; it's
not so much the public. It has to do more with the intangibility of film, finally,
and the fact that you turn off the switch and it's gone. I wanted to make objects
that embodied the same history as film but in Paris I had been making mutascopes
way back. I was granted a show at Iris Clair. After the Denise René fiasco
I went . . . .

PAUL CUMMINGS: To the other wild lady.

ROBERT BREER: The other wild lady, yeah. And I had a slot between Tinguely
and Yves Klein and I was going to be in the spring. I was going to show mutascopes.
I have then around here, and films. I had a film I was going to show in her
gallery window because she had a little tiny gallery and so people could see
it out on the street, you know. That was called Eye Wash. I don't know if you
saw that. And the Tinguely show was in June sometime or April, maybe May. I
don't remember. And then I was going to show and then Yves Klein. It was sort
of towards the end of the season, so Klein wanted to move back a little more
into the season and Tinguely couldn't shorten his show and I was beginning to
get squeezed between these guys. I complained to Iris that I wanted the show
to last longer than it finally got down to. I don't know, first it was a month,
then it was three weeks and then it was to be two weeks or something like that.
And I got mad and decided that I wasn't  I didn't like that idea and didn't
know what was going on. I didn't like being bullied by these two guys so . .
. . We're friends, I knew her very well, so I said, let's put it off and have
it in the fall. I have the paper somewhere I kept to the effect that she would
guarantee me a show in the fall on such and such date and everything. I guess
that must have been '59. I came back here and never went back so I never had
my show at Iris Clair. But I had been making mutascopes. They're on paper and
as such they're very impermanent and that seemed to be serious problem, that
they would fall apart. What's his name, Hulten, about that time got together
with Spoerri, actually took it away from Hulten, and went to Stedelik with Sandburg.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Carl Sandburg, not Carl the other Sandburg.

ROBERT BREER: That was his movement show. Did you hear about that?

PAUL CUMMINGS: Yeah, right.

ROBERT BREER: For that I made a couple of small mutascopes and I put together
film images, all drawings from Inner and Outer Space. You probably haven't seen
that either. Abstract drawings. Anyhow, I made a whole wall display which went
over and then went into that show and traveled from Stedelik to Stockholm. It
was a big, big kinetic art show. And the mutascopes went along and they were
in festivals. We just had one reconstructed somewhere. The remains of them are
here. Shortly after that we made the mutascopes and used plastic cards and really
worked into that and got a semi-permanent art form out of it. But I became bored
with that. It seemed subsidiary to film, really. But those were the first sculptures.
Then I began searching for other connections. The Bent Wire is kind of crucial.
It's just a long wire that undulates and not in any regular way, except it revolves
around an invisible axis. When you revolve it slowly it does seem to undulate,
although actually it's a wire that is turning. When you see it in profile it
looks like a wavy line and this was the way of solving the problem of kinetic
drawing. My line that come out of films, you know, . . . . So I made few of
those and I still consider those as transitional important hinges, I guess.
And then there are some others. Did you read that thing in the Times on Calder?
I know him. We went to see him last summer and the way he repels his interviewers,
you know . . . . I don't know what kind of pose that is.

PAUL CUMMINGS: The papa bear pose.

ROBERT BREER: Yeah. I can't do it, but you're working the way I'm working and
I wouldn't think of offending . . . .

PAUL CUMMINGS: I remember one of those rods that was bent and you turned it
and it had three or four things hanging down.

ROBERT BREER: Yeah, right, damn. I lost that. That's with Bonino. I have to
recoup that. Yeah, that was a variation on the thing, in its pure state. That
became a kind of Dada  the wire coming out of the box is motorized. I
have that upstairs. It isn't working now; I have the wire here.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Was that an early use of the motor again?

ROBERT BREER: Yeah. Actually, the first wire was a handcrank. Just like the
mutascopes are handcranked. I didn't want to put motors  I knew I could
put motors on them, but . . . .

PAUL CUMMINGS: It's a different association.

ROBERT BREER: Yeah, and actually a motor is better for all that. But then to
put a motor on a mutascope you might as well have a film, it seems. I couldn't
reconcile the two things and I finally went over to motors because I felt that
the participation of somebody turning a crank . . . . They get involved in a
kinesthetic thing which isn't necessarily related to what they were seeing.
I think that set up suggestions that I wasn't interested in resolving. I really
wanted the attention to be fully on what they visually . . . . So I reluctantly
motorized the thing and I don't know if that's the answer. The story of my sculpture
was very experimental in that way. I mean, once in a while I take, like, a rotating
broomstick when I want it. And that belongs to Oldenburg. It's just a broomstick
with a motor on one end and it rotates. The only reason that you can see that
it's rotating on its own base that hangs on the wall is because the broomstick
is discolored here and there. If you pay attention, you see it's rotating very
slowly, quietly, on the wall. It seems to me that that's full circle. It answers
all the requirements of something that's formally composed, self-contained,
and so forth. But other than that a lot of those sculptures were transitional
things.

PAUL CUMMINGS: When did the floats appear? How did they get to be styrofoam
and move around?

ROBERT BREER: I was looking for bulky material that's light weight that I could
manipulate. So there it was. I didn't like it because it was so damn fragile.
But then I did like it because it was fragile. Because if it was fragile it
was an expression of the ephemeralness. Anyhow, that's how I chose styrofoam
 I could deal with it. And that meant I had to use very small motors.
It was all in the interest of actual economy, physical economy, every kind of
economy. I took a year to make thirty pieces. One after another. As I made one
then that would influence what the next one would be and I kept them all running.
As I made them I'd add a new one to the group, and that was that first show
 that was what, '66?

PAUL CUMMINGS: They weren't in the first show?

ROBERT BREER: No, the first show was all these other things. No, this was a
great breakthrough, putting wheels on a thing and sending it out on its own,
for me. There wasn't much stress on the wheels. None, in fact  you couldn't
see them. It was the idea that the thing departed and went to parts unknown,
that it was going in a straight line somewhere.

PAUL CUMMINGS: But it would stop and go.

ROBERT BREER: The first piece I made had no such switching at all. It would
just go. And that was what I was interested in. I realized that when it got
to a wall it would stop and that would be the end of my experience, you know.
And I had to resolve that somehow. So the switching was only to constantly keep
recreating this situation of freedom, and then, when I had two pieces, I realized
that they might bump into each other. That created a kind of anecdote that I
wasn't very interested in at the time. That bothered me. I didn't care I wasn't
very interested in at that time. That bothered me. I didn't care that they collided.
I wanted more of the essence of the thing that it was . . . .

PAUL CUMMINGS: Drawing a line again, in a way.

ROBERT BREER: Yeah, maybe but then again that would be closing. For me, the
adventure was the fact that this thing was autonomous, I think, and I couldn't
predict it's trajectory, and I wasn't really interested in it. I remember I
got a suggestion once a month from somebody that I should record their travels,
you know. I can see the best of these might be interesting, but that's another
effect.

PAUL CUMMINGS: How did you decide on the shapes of them because of that kind
of arc, and then they got into various other geometric . . . .

ROBERT BREER: Well, I think a lot of the shapes are part of my brand of . .
. these are biases that developed out of contact with art. You could say Arp
because a kind of whimsy that Arp has that lends itself to my . . . . Part of
its there, and part of it is some notions about formality and purism. These
are influences; the shapes generate themselves, each other. One begot the other,
and I though in terms of collage, of fragments, so that this shape wasn't complete
without the other one. I was making a family of shapes, and families are kind
of incomplete. You know, an individual in a family is somewhat more complete
with the other members around, right? I don't know if that holds up but at least
one shape . . . . If I made the shape that took care of that, I wouldn't make
another one slightly different. I didn't really, so I was planning minute variations
on a theme.

PAUL CUMMINGS: There are variations on the same shapes that you see on the
film.

ROBERT BREER: Yeah, sure, I suppose they're cubist or, you know. It's a certain
dosage of arc to straight line. Why does one have these, I don't know. I like
Nicholson in his quiet way, I don't know why. That's one of the influences.
As I say, Arp may be another. One of the things I didn't know that I was going
to run into was the effect of the floor on these shapes. The fact that they're
sliding across the floor that this meeting of two surfaces you see in motion
made for an effect of something being sawed off. I think that there's an implication
that they're floating objects, that they penetrate the floor, and that can be
exaggerated or diminished by whether it's a cube that's been truncated on the
bottom plane so that it looks like it's partly under water, you see. That's
one of the factors. And the fact that that bottom base never rested so that
you've got a very - what's the word - insecure situation there, two planes facing
each other but one plane is always moving away from the other, in relationship
with the other. So that made that part of those pieces that made them already
fragmentary. The other planes are complete in relationship to the rest of environment,
and that was one of the big factors. The other thing was the surfaces that were
meeting each other. There were some practical considerations, too, about switching
ideas and some shapes function better than others and promptly help me avoid,
or in some cases, I had a piece hit a desk, go under a desk and tip over, and
that was just to keep the secretary awake there. And I had some that were perverse,
one or two of those. And of course the whole thing is a matter of keeping my
own interest in it and playing terrific battles with myself. It doesn't show,
but you get these funny lines going as a nervous . . . different vibrations,
and you can loose the whole lining in your stomach over a question like whether
I should curve a little more or less this way or that way.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Well, then did they start to grow larger? Because the first
ones are fairly portable and small.

ROBERT BREER: Well, when I have an idea like this which I had, it came as the
usual coup de Foridre, you know, the lightening bolt, I went into it right away.
There's no time to lose, and that means doing something that was possible. Maybe
I begin to wonder if I'm not just basically awkward, that I find difficult solutions
to simple problems, and although I think they're simple solutions, they might
not be. So, that character fault is such that makes for some interesting results,
you know. I really think so; it may lack grace in certain areas, and I tend
to punch things through which means they come out in different shapes than they
otherwise would. I have to go out of my way to resolve it. So those first floats
probably were as pieces of mechanical engineering. I had enough acquaintance
with that to know that they looked like they're made by a shoe clerk, you know,
or whatever a non-engineer would be. And that was part of my conceit of not
how may rebellion against that whole area - where are you now when I need you.
I had problems. Once or twice when I had someone tell me where to get a motor,
I didn't know. And I have students now who realize that sometimes the biggest
boost you can give somebody is where to buy a toothbrush. So the EAT came into
it somewhere along the line, and I called Billy and had engineers offering me
all kinds of motors finally. Billy gave me the first little tiny motors from
Japanese toy turntables, I think. Incredibly underpowered machines for my first
floats. I remember Jasper Johns came out with Billy one time to look at my things
well before I had shown them. I had a few pieces around. I had bumpers on them
in those days before I discovered how to make the whole piece a bumper; there's
another obtuseness in my work, you know. I suppose I mean there were times when
I was very upset by not being able to think clearly through a thing.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Well, do you think clearly, you know to pick this thing up in
the process of cutting a shape and the physical assembling of it, or is it kind
of an idea that is vague?

ROBERT BREER: Yeah, it's an idea that's vague. It's a feeling. I have to work
out the feeling, you know. It's a matter of . . . . It's just like painting.
You stand back and give it a special squint that makes it. You know, they have
all these gimmicks, the corner of the eye and so forth. The same thing there
 it's a matter of dancing around the thing until it settles and so forth.
It's intuititive, but I'm mentioning influences because I recognize those afterwards
and at the time I'm not thinking. No, it's very much a question of feeling.
Right now, anything I do is certainly that way. Occasionally, I'll throw on
something consciously, but I don't think I permit that really, or I'm sorry
if there is anything too self-conscious if that's the word.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Well, how did you get associated with Bonino? How did you meet
Bonino?

ROBERT BREER: Well, Bonino originally had a partner named DelJunco, a South
American adventurer of sorts, I don't know. And Deljuco and Bonino started up
off Madison Avenue I think, their first gallery. No, I'm wrong. They took over
that gallery I guess the way it is now, upstairs in the same building, wherever
it was. DelJunco had a gallery in Canada, in Toronto. Bonino had his gallery
in South America and another one in Rome that was run by Bonino's brother, I
think, and Bonino's former wife ran the one in Buenos Aires and another one
in Rio. Anyhow, they had South American artists, but they wanted to introduce
some other nationalities into this gallery. I had been looking out for a gallery
at this point. Jack Meyer had gone to Europe, and I had been to see Leo Castelli
years before with some things which he had said he liked better than Tinguely's
things and that he'd look me up in Europe when he went over there, which is
"I'll call you," and he never did. I was fishing around. Dore Ashton
sent me around way back when. My God, I went to Betty Parsons. The other night,
John Cage, Betty Parsons, a guy named Ben Patterson, three or four of us were
playing poker, and I reminded Betty Parsons of that time, and she didn't remember.
I was a young kid really. That was in the early fifties.

PAUL CUMMINGS: She's a good poker player?

ROBERT BREER: Great. No, we were all bad poker players. The only one that made
money was Sari Dean. Do you know Sari Dean? It was her party in New York. She
called us up. Low stakes, I lost ten or twelve bucks that night. Well, I went
around to galleries, and I hated it. It was awful. I had introductions, but
I just didn't go in. I didn't have much to show. I really had a few mutascopes,
some fold-down kind of scroll drawings, some films and some good intentions,
you know. I had some of those early drawings, some films and some good intentions,
you know. I had some of those early kinetic pieces that I showed. DelJunco was
that guy that, oh, Mary Bauermiester  they picked her up. I think she
got a big review in the Times by somebody. She suddenly was on the map. And
then, they were looking around with kind of high powered American gallery techniques
of supporting the artist and so forth. They got a hold of Mary Bauermiester.
Mary, I think, sicked them on me. I forget how I met Mary, but Mary said she
wanted me in that gallery, so DelJunco came to see me. He was very persuasive,
he and Bonino, and they set up my first show. They gave me the best contract,
and it was better than I could hope for. You take Janis, I played with Janis.
I knew some of the people like Oldenburg, Rauschenburg, but you know it's just
impossible to use those friend connections, and I didn't know how to handle
it. I was the only American in the place again.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Well, how do you like them as dealers over the years?

ROBERT BREER: Now, I'm getting into other areas. I feel like I like John Dean
now very much. Oh, I liked them very much. I'm not saying I didn't agree with
their choice of artists. In many cases, I felt very much that I liked the other
artists too, but I never felt that anyone else that they showed had anything
to do with what I was doing, and I was specifically offended by the kind of
Europeaness of most of their artist and by the . . . . I guess I don't like
galleries anyhow. I don't like the people that come in and go into the back
room to buy things, and the atmosphere, the jewelry cases , the special privilege,
and the whole thing. I don't like that. I don't like 57th Street and Fifth Avenue
for that reason. It's more like walking into a jewelry store. It wasn't robust
enough, bare enough, hard enough, or tough enough.

PAUL CUMMINGS: But they sell things for you?

ROBERT BREER: Yes, they did. They had problems. I know they had problems selling.
I have problems selling them. They were very kind to me commercially. There
was finally a settling of accounts last year, and I don't want to go on record.
I can only say nice things about them. The only disagreements I had were probably
my ideas on how they should run a gallery. When the Green Gallery split up,
I specifically told Dick Bellamy that I wanted to get Bonino to pick any of
those artists that were floating around. You know, they were all floating in
different directions, so he sent Dan Flavin. Flavin wrote me a letter, a couple
of letters. But Bonino wouldn't have anything to do with Flavin. He couldn't
sell flourescent lighting, he felt. And I was so embarrassed I ever wrote Flavin.
I was totally embarrassed about that, and I have been ever since. I even apologized
to him since then. But Bonino couldn't see it. Now that was an example; I had
a chance then to make something out of Bonino Gallery with Dick Bellamy's people.
The guy was selling Bauermiester's work and stuff like that. So, they, at that
time, were doing very well. I was embarrassed. I didn't know how to do it, and
I wasn't very pally with the right artists at that time that were floating around,
and so nothing worked.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Also, I think that a dealer shouldn't take on an artist that's
selling if he can't relate to . . . .

ROBERT BREER: Sure, it wouldn't make sense. I guess I sensed that. I guess
I knew it. Sure. I'm in no position to impose my will on Bonino, but I felt
afterwards that he made decisions that finally were unacceptable to me. I don't
have a gallery now, actually, and you can put that on the record. Put that on
your tape. But, I also got slightly disenchanted by the gallery, the whole gallery
scene. Sidney Janis came to look at my show. Maybe Claes sent him there. Claes
made some overtures at dinner after his own show with Janis that I should be
in their gallery, and they agreed. But, it was that kind of slightly boozy,
noisy propositions that I couldn't follow up, and they didn't. And, I feel that's
totally the wrong space for me. I couldn't use it as a space, you know, for
all their prestige and color. John Weber's an old friend, but I have certain
hostilities. There's some kind of . . . I don't know. I'm getting too old for
a gallery. I told Hultan I was going to show only in museums, and he offered
me a retrospective in Stockholm. Now he's moving to Paris, so . . . . But, that's
really what I've done since. I haven't had any shows. I had a show in Detroit
just because I started to have one there at J.L. Hudson, their little branch
gallery. It was a disaster. I was supposed to have one at the Institute, Sam
Waggstaff, a small show there. He split me, and that didn't gel. Films, Hammerskold
Plaza, at Yale  the show was kind of a boost. I don't know. You know this
gets into the confessional area, about my own status and concern. I don't know
what it is. I'm flattered by this kind of attention. Revered in some places.
I had a girl doing her Ph.D. thesis on my films, and things like that. Anyhow,
is this time to wind up the tape?

PAUL CUMMINGS: Just a short question about the films. Are your films shown
abroad a great deal? Or mostly in this country?

ROBERT BREER: Well, mostly here. They do get around though. I just talked to
a girl last week who's setting up with her husband. The two of them are Argos
Films. They produce and shoot films in France, and they just leased a theater
in which they are going to show this kind of film. They're setting up a kind
of cinematographic rival to Langlois on a much more moderate scale. But, they
want to distribute and show my kind of films. So, we're talking about contracts
now. That will happen, and I think I had a film that was playing in Sweden,
Vienna, London and so forth. They get shown. They get around. Occasionally,
I get a check in some strange money. The most is real beans, you know, in terms
of income. But, there is probably pretty good distribution among those people
interested.

PAUL CUMMINGS: What about the Anthology Film Archives? The just did a whole
. . . .

ROBERT BREER: Well, that's every month. Yeah, that's been going around. They're
moving. Lost some of their backing, I think. Yeah, I think that's a delightful
thing to happen in my lifetime, that they put together this group of films.
Very controversial as you know. But, I think it's a marvelous thing, and that's
like home to me in a way because it's a place where you get the proper respect
and where the films are available. I can tell somebody when they ask me where
can I see your films. I can say next month. Then there's big traffic in schools.
That's quite big. But in Europe it's slowly happening, and they don't have the
ground base that we have here in the schools. They hope, and they plan, and
they expect that it will happen.

[TAPE TWO SIDE ONE]

PAUL CUMMINGS: What about the 1960 film "Homage to Jean Tinguely"
at the Museum of Modern Art?

ROBERT BREER: You didn't see it?

PAUL CUMMINGS: No, I didn't. How did it come about that you made that?

ROBERT BREER: Well, I was a friend of Tinguely. How did that happen? Well,
I'm trying to think. When was that, 1960? I had just come back, and he had a
show at Staempfli. Well, he was an old friend. Staempfli picked him up and gave
him a show here. I was back here. How did it happen? I don't remember. I guess
he suggested that I make a film. I remember going up there to the Museum with
Peter Selz, and one way or another people were talking about making film at
the same time he did his thing. Not a documentary film of it but something at
the same time with the Museum to finance it, and they were telling us that they
didn't have any money for such a thing. And so I said okay, I'll go ahead and
do it anyhow. I didn't think I'd use much more than three reels of film. I saw
a lot of Jean when he was here. For one thing, I was a translator. He was beginning
English, so I ended up doing a lot of translating for him and whoever he was
dealing with, and so I went down there a lot. I helped him. Billy Kluver at
that time, Billy had looked me up I guess through Hulten. Hulten was an old
friend, you know.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Where did you meet Hulten?

ROBERT BREER: In Paris. We made a film together when I went back there, the
one on the Pope. Well, he made a film on my camera stand, an abstract film.
He might have made his first film on that camera stand, I don't know. And then
I wanted to do a little collage film and ended up using some photos out of the
Pope. I assisted him as collaborator on that film. It went to Sweden, and it
somehow got confused that it was his film - when I got up there, he was embarrassed.
But anyhow, it's called the "funniest film in the world ever made"
or something like that. Lasts 30 seconds. Not funny any more, but in those days
collage was new. Anyhow, Hulten sent Kluver to meet me and Kluver to meet Tinguely,
I guess. Kluver was a Swede and a scientist not content with ferns and Bell
telephones. It's pretty dreary out there. So we got together helping Tinguely.
He was helping drill for him and stuff, and I started making this film. I lived
over in Tarrytown. I had rented a house for six months. Went into this museum,
and shot this film while he was working outside in the Fuller Dome where he
built that thing. And I didn't normally use the camera in any other way but
for animation, and I didn't know exactly what I was doing. I had a zoom lens,
and I had a tripod, and I used the zoom lens, and it did single frame shooting.
I had done some; I had made a little film which had never been distributed because
it never got past the sort of rough stage. In Cassis where we had spent the
summer a few months before we came back there - you know where it is, it is
next to Marsailes. You go there by train, it's a nice little town. I modified
my film. And the camera that I had first borrowed from my old man became my
camera, his old Bolex. The trouble with it was I like to shoot single frame
and normal speed and mix it all up which just comes down in practice. Jonas
Mekas does it all the time, it all moves this way. I don't know, all kinds of
people go around thinking that the shutter's a single frame. I don't claim to
have invented the process. I just did it before any of those people did. I don't
even know if they knew how much I did of that kind of thing. But I went so far
as to change the apparatus on the front of the camera to correct the exposure
setting for the single frame. If you click single frames, it is overexposed,
you know, if you shoot continuous with the others. So, I had a device on the
outside that actually physically turned the stop on the lens so I could switch
back and forth, so I could moderate the speed. When I wanted to, I could run
it slow or fast.

PAUL CUMMINGS: You could almost do the editing of the film in ....

ROBERT BREER: Yeah, sort of. And so I shot some footage with it this summer.
The whole point of the film thing was to somehow break out of the confines of
the small experimental film. I had visions at one point, and some pressure by
my small fan club, to really take it in my teeth to make a film that would be
known as just a film. I wasn't sure about that distinction, you know.

PAUL CUMMINGS: You mean like 33 millimeter?

ROBERT BREER: 35 in Europe is not like doing . . . . I worked on a film over
there with Michel Fano who is a well established sound engineer for a lot of
French films. He made himself an experimental film which is an absolute atrocious
bomb, but it was a serious full-fledged production and the last short film.
And, I went out on location, and his producers had bought a small village on
a mountain top down in Savoy where he proceeded to make this arty art film.
And, he used a girl who was in, who became a starlet in the next film, she made
a Chabrol, I guess. I forgot her name, she had pretty blue eyes, and she was
dumb as hell, you know. Oh, she kept getting phone calls, and they were trying
to get her released to make this big film, you know, and the whole shit and
shamroll of film production. I got a taste of it, you know, and I knew they
were making a bomb, but I was curious about the process and found out about
script girls and all of that. It all seemed incredible that they were infatuated
with their own activities so much so that they had no overview of what they
were doing. And, he admired me and admired my films enough to set me up to make
inserts in his film  kind of an hallucination sequence and you can imagine
how they would treat my material  which I set out to do and found a 35
millimeter camera. So I got a taste of this and felt from there to becoming
D.W. Griffith was only a question of getting the right backing.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Money.

ROBERT BREER: Yeah, but it just wasn't really any of those things. It just
was really how I could artistically encompass all those ingredients, and I didn't
think I could, never did, finally. But, there was a point in time when 
I didn't say Point in Time, that was Watergate stuff  I entertained a
notion of becoming a big mogul, you know, with a swimming pool for myself, all
that glamour and stuff. I don't think I ever took it too seriously, but I did
want enough prestige. I wanted to be taken seriously. I didn't like the idea
of being known as a nut experimenting off on the fringe, you know. So, let's
see, this was apropos of something. How did that . . . oh yeah, I sure did slide
off there. Tinguely. Well, okay, so I had some notions of using the camera and
other people and putting together a non-narrative feature film. This had nothing
to do with Tinguely, with my Tinguely thing. The Tinguely thing just developed
as I shot film while helping him. I had shot a little film of people before,
and I guess that's how I got off on that. And I was sort of interested in -
I use stop-motion a lot in my film, and I had one glorious accident otherwise
I wouldn't have ever put it together as a film and ever let it be seen. In excitement
and nervousness the night of the opening of the thing, I cranked back the film
through the camera and shot it so - double exposure  which I abhorred
as an idea. I would never use double exposure consciously, but it was so nice
at times, and it saved the day because the footage I had was otherwise kind
of pedestrian, most of it was. So now I got interested in the editing of it,
and I think the result was okay, it was kind of interesting. And it was a relief
from all the fussiness I had been used to in the films that I had done where
I could use longer time sequences and much more attenuated rhythms and so forth.
But researchers would be disappointed when they look at it to gind out about
Tinguely cause it's . . . .

PAUL CUMMINGS: It's something else.

ROBERT BREER: Yeah, it really doesn't reveal that much that way. It wasn't
even supposed to have as much documentation as it does. It was an exercise in
editing, though. So that's the film. He was delighted with it. And at the time,
he was a friend of Hulsenbeck, you know.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Yeah. He stayed with them.

ROBERT BREER: Stayed with them. And that's how I got to know him, from that.
They all came out to dinner after - I haven't seen him in years - is he dead?

PAUL CUMMINGS: He's living in Switzerland.

ROBERT BREER: Well last time I saw him - he's quite old.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Oh yeah. Still tops.

ROBERT BREER: Tough. Jesus. Well, I find that in a way but I don't buy all
his fustering about Dadaism.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Well how did the EAT thing - Pepsico and Osaka - how did you
get involved in that?

ROBERT BREER: That's a book you know. It is a book.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Well, that was against your ability right?

ROBERT BREER: No. On the contrary, I started that and got the little end of
it.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Oh, really? I didn't know that. Ah ha!

ROBERT BREER: Yeah that was through [inaudible] in the book. I'm not making
it up either but it doesn't matter much. Because again, like all things, you
know, it's accidental. I feel accidents are fatal, that the Pepsi-Cola Vice-President,
an Englishman, was given charge of this pavilion project . . . . I haven't even
read the book. I don't have a copy right here, but anyhow it's all there. I've
forgotten a little bit the history of it, but he was put in charge of doing
something with it. The pavilion which Pepsico managed to get from the Japanese
in return for another favor for the Osaka fair - that fair was intended to be
non-commercial, more than all the other fairs, but of course every fair has
that intention you know, supposedly. This one and so forth and the last one
and so forth. I know that the fair officials consulted Hulten; they had at one
time intention of dedicating the fair. He suggested they dedicate the whole
fair to one major problem in society such as pollution, you know. They didn't
take him up on that, and it finally ended up as a fair like all other fairs.
Very much like the Expo '67. Anyhow, the V.P. Pepsi-Cola guy was a neighbor,
a friend. This is kind of a fat community here, and he's down the hill, a friend,
a great entrepreneur, and also has a kind of an interesting background - a father
who was a Zen priest for some time in Japan, and his wife's father designed
the Ritz Hotel and the Queen Mary and things like that and so he's a little
more sensitive than any of the other people. And I knew him, and he knew I made
films an so he came to me to get ideas about the pavilion, and one thing led
to another. I found that I could maybe sway him to get my floats around. Eventually
he got in deeper, and I suggested Billy Kluver being brought into it because
it was on a scale that needed a lot of elaboration technical men, artists, and
so forth. So that's how it happened.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Were you pleased with the results?

ROBERT BREER: Yeah. Well, I was pleased with some of the results. Delighted
with some and disappointed in others. There's a disagreeable aftertaste because
of the way things turned out - a little hard to follow the development of the
thing up through its various channels to see what really happened. It's all
in that book. You know the inevitable confusion of interests and non-confusion
of interests which was industry and commerce. All to be expected. The thing
was built to our specifications and such. Fantastic that it happened. I was
impressed, and I got to see my things floating around. I had a disappointment
in terms of public reception of the thing. I expected it to have some impact,
and apparently, there was none. Apparently, there was none, you know. People
didn't even notice the damn things. And, I also went for this fantastic inside
mirror that we had where it was such an unspecific experience that at least
they could not come to terms with that experience. It was new to everyone. It
wasn't new in any given order of experiences.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Shock.

ROBERT BREER: Yeah. It didn't shock. It was very stimulating, that dome. My
things of course are on a different order - very discreet and floating around.
We don't have good pictures of the inside. They'd have to be three-dimensional
pictures. It's very impressive what happens inside that thing. But because it
wasn't - we considered it enough in itself to be explored - I don't think this
agreed with people who wanted to have their experience defined in the terms
that they understood, you know. There wasn't any brochure to satisfy them that
way or anything. So I think that probably I don't know what impact it would
have. I hope that it would have a late-blooming impact, you know, maybe begin
to wonder what that was all about and had forgotten all the other things that
did impress them at the time, who knows?

PAUL CUMMINGS: When did Oldenburg come into this? Did you meet him when you
came back? In '60?

ROBERT BREER: Yeah, well I met Claes and knew a lot of people through Billy.
It was during one of the Ray Gun Theatre stuff, '61? That's where I met him.
He wanted Billy to do some work with somebody, and I said I made movies and
Claes wanted to have a movie made of his happenings, and I said I didn't make
that kind of movie. And then Bob Whitman and Oldenburg came out to my place,
and they saw films. They were at a party out here and saw my films. They got
interested in them. I didn't want to shoot film of his things after that but
by the end of that season I thought we could get together. Maybe he could do
a Happening out in the country. Did you see that film?

PAUL CUMMINGS: No. Oh yes wait a minute.

ROBERT BREER: That's got Oldenburg and the golf business in it.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Right. Right.

ROBERT BREER: We came out here and shot film for about five days and put it
all together. It was my film in the sense that I edited it. It was his film
in that he supplied all the events that took place and the actors. He directed
little things, and I shot that, and then I edited the film and with my emphasis
on editing I assumed it was my film but Claes would get equal billing if we
put the titles together. I still consider it my film because making a film is
gluing it together since it's a non-narrative film. There wasn't any scenario
or anything. But of course, the film reflects my understanding of his ideas
of simultaneity and everything that is special about that, you know.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Do you make scenarios for the films?

ROBERT BREER: No. The first film I made I told myself  not the first
the film, but the second or third film  I got very pretentious and made
a long scenario and thought I could work that way. It eventually became just
a log of what I was doing rather than a scenario for what I would do, and it
just gradually transformed into that and after that I didn't even need a log
I had films. Right? So they just grow and make more of that. Eventually they
have to be I can't see any reason for writing out a film except to overcome
technical difficulty, and with this kind of film, there really isn't that sort
of stuff. Occasionally, I have to plot a movement or something that's not in
my vocabulary, and I have to lay it out a little bit.

PAUL CUMMINGS: You don't seem very interested in making films of people or
places or things like that. You like the animated. . . .

ROBERT BREER: Well, the Oldenburg thing and the Tinguely were the only two
times I've gone in that direction at all, and in those cases, they were collaborations
more or less. The Tinguely film isn't about people either. So I guess only Oldenburg.
Yeah, well I'm an abstract artist and I'm interested in let's say stimulated
by pure visual phenomenon. I don't know what to say. The strongest impulse in
my career is to make some kind of pure aesthetic statement, a kinesthetic statement,
you know, and that's what I respond to. If I involve things on different levels
such as human relations or projections of anything at a distance, I'm still
working in concrete terms. This is what it is. In fact, I wrote all around the
walls of a place where I made one film, "This film is what it is what it
is what it is what it is," you know. That's the basis of my work. If I
bring in any illustrative material, it's always subordinated to the design,
you know.

PAUL CUMMINGS: You had mentioned that you're teaching.

ROBERT BREER: Yeah, I teach at Cooper, and I do an awful lot of traveling around
to schools. I'm going to Pittsburgh for three days in the fall and Harvard.
I do this a lot.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Well, when did that all start? When did you get involved with
Cooper?

ROBERT BREER: This will by my third year coming up at Cooper. The irregular
kind of dropping in at places has been going on for years. I've done a lot of
that.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Do you like that, traveling around?

ROBERT BREER: Well, I like a certain dosage of that. It gets tiresome, but
it pays well, you know, and I enjoy it sometimes. You can go to a place and
do your number. You're on the best possible terms with everybody, and then you
leave, you know.

PAUL CUMMINGS: What do you usually do if you go somewhere for a day, two days,
three days, or something?

ROBERT BREER: Well, the three day ones are something new that I've worked up,
animation workshops where I go into a place and give . . . this is experimental
right now. I don't know if I want to encourage that or not. I don't like that
much traveling around. One day, okay. I get back where I started from. How do
I like it? What did you ask me?

PAUL CUMMINGS: Well, do you find it provocative? What do you do with . . .
.

ROBERT BREER: It's almost down to a routine. I had an initiation with Jack
Meyer the first time I presented films. He insisted that I present the films.
I had incredible stage fright. I had it before in high school in my famous football
days. I was captain of the team, and I had to give the rally in the morning,
the pep rally you know, in a small school, but nevertheless I was scared stiff
looking at all those faces. I always managed to look out the window and talk
about the weather for the game, you know. I hated it. And, the only course I
flunked in college was speech, and my speech was about the guard position in
football. I was my specialty, and I managed to get in a crouch and run around
the stage a lot, but it still didn't keep me entirely away from the podium which
frightened me just as an object, you know. So, when I started this business,
I was terrified. The Modern Museum put together some of these independent films
a long time ago. I had to go up there, and a peculiar thing happened. I was
so goddamn stagestruck that I overcame it in the shock, you know, just like
that, by one of those conclusions that nothing could be worse than this so what
have I got to lose. And I said something that was funny although it wasn't intended
to be funny particularly, but it turned out to be. It relieved them, and it
relieved me. I was able to continue, and that was a breakthrough. I'd get invited
back to places assuming I'd be funny again, and I wasn't always, you know. And
so I've been on a lot of panels, and I guess I became inured to it. I no longer
get stomach cramps or other problems associated with speaking before large crowds,
and now it's very easy. I put together packages. I don't repeat myself, it's
very natural, the way I am now.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Do you like teaching?

ROBERT BREER: I like what I just described better than continuous teaching
because continuous teaching is much more serious. You know you have to get involved
with that other person, and that's a huge responsibility. I have four kids already,
you know, and so that makes much bigger inroads into my privacy and my . . .
.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Energy levels?

ROBERT BREER: I don't really like it too much. I'm just doing it. I like the
kids. I can't close that door. I need that, in fact I was thinking of expanding
it somehow.

PAUL CUMMINGS: What do you teach? Animation film process?

ROBERT BREER: Yeah, and I try to open it up to any kind of expression involving
movement and motion. But even so, I'm not just that interested in motion either.
Change, okay. You have some skeleton for the class. It's pretty much run by
the students' interest a lot. I conduct their interest, but I'm just learning
to teach that way. I don't really know much about it.

PAUL CUMMINGS: How do you start off when you talk?

ROBERT BREER: What I've been doing is getting the kids together and presenting
myself to them in case they don't know me, which is often the case, and I show
them my work and explain to them this is what I do and this is what I know about
and this is what I can talk about and this is what you can fight against or
work with and it's in these areas, what we will or would be doing and so forth.
But that's the way I start. It starts with my presenting myself, and then they
present themselves. Little by little, I get to know them and I guess everybody
works this way. It's a workshop situation, and the kids teach each other, you
know, and I step back.

PAUL CUMMINGS: How many students do you have?

ROBERT BREER: It's kept down to about fifteen.

PAUL CUMMINGS: It's manageable but not too few.

ROBERT BREER: No, I don't know. I think three or four good ones would be better.
Getting all those others  they don't pay for that.

ROBERT BREER: Regular teaching. I've always stayed very clear of it. Sporadic
kind of teaching, short seminars, and workshops but I've always been afraid
of it. Even now it takes a hell of a lot of my time. I kind of resent it.

PAUL CUMMINGS: How many days, or how many hours?

ROBERT BREER: Just one day a week I go in, three hours a week. It takes time
to get up, and I have to . . . .

PAUL CUMMINGS: Preparation.

ROBERT BREER: And coming back, it makes the week very quick, and I can't trace
my pace working on a project or anything. Then, there's a sprinkling of all
those other teaching things thrown in which I can't refuse, so I don't know
how I got into it. There is some notion that keeping in touch with kids and
what's going on, you know, is an excuse for doing this. I suppose it's all right.
I suppose there's some of that that rubs off. I don't know to what end.

PAUL CUMMINGS: What about travel? You've traveled to Japan for Expo, right?
And all these little things in Europe. Have you traveled a great deal?

ROBERT BREER: Well, I went to Japan three times and spent some time there,
and I had a chance to go to India. They invited me to go to the design school
there for a two month, three month period, but I can't do that right now. And,
I was invited to go to Berlin for a year with everything paid, this year, but
it doesn't enchant me particularly. I don't have any wanderlust. I don't travel
unless there's something specific to go for, a show or something. I had a film
in Germany in 1968 at Ricke Gallery. I'd opened this gallery in Colonge. That's
why I go to places, and whenever I do I tend to forget where I am. If I go away
for three or four days, I'm liable to forget I have a family or anything else
and that frightens me, you know.

PAUL CUMMINGS: How long have you lived here?

ROBERT BREER: Well, we've lived in this place five years. And we had a little
house further down the road before that since '60. So that's thirteen years.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Been in this neighborhood?

ROBERT BREER: Yeah, we just love this place, it's incredible.

PAUL CUMMINGS: You've got all the right room.

ROBERT BREER: Oh, yeah, it's beautiful. Well of course it was a mess. All the
windows were broken and it had been abandoned. It was a mess.

PAUL CUMMINGS: You've been doing a project at Lippencott, right?

ROBERT BREER: Oh, that's done.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Oh, it is?

ROBERT BREER: That's part of the Swedish collection. You know about that? You
know about that don't you? The New York Collection for Sweden?

PAUL CUMMINGS: Oh, that.

ROBERT BREER: Kluver is putting out, you know this is a selection made by Rontus
Hulten. The whole collection will be shipped to Sweden. They're able to pay
for it. They're raising a million bucks or something. That's a heavy collection.
It's a big eight foot diameter dome.

PAUL CUMMINGS: No, I didn't see it.

ROBERT BREER: It was at 420 Broadway, John Weber's.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Is this one of the largest pieces you've built then?

ROBERT BREER: Well, in diameter. There's one that's this high I call a rider
float. It's meant for you to ride on. You can do that on those little ones at
Hammerskold Plaza also.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Oh, really?

ROBERT BREER: You can sit on it if you want. I worked as long as I did to be
able to get on the thing and ride around on it. One person  that's not
public conveyance or anything  can have that kind of experience. It's
a bit different to lounge on the thing, presumably go out in your yard, you
know, and climb on this thing and drift around, and experience how it would
back away from obstacles. That's the vision of it. The reality of it is something
else. I designed it with large tires, and it was expensive. They build it out
there.

PAUL CUMMINGS: You know, one thing that I was curious about was the installation
you had at Yale this last Spring.

ROBERT BREER: Did you see that?

PAUL CUMMINGS: Yes, with sorts of long rods and tubes and pieces. That seemed
very different from other things.

ROBERT BREER: Well, I don't know how you saw it up there.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Well, it kind of moves around behind a little.

ROBERT BREER: It was very disagreeable to me. Also, the floor was two-toned.
I don't know who was responsible for that, and I don't care. But it just wasn't
ideal presentation.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Are they meant to work in a series or individually?

ROBERT BREER: No, it was meant to be a clutter of those pieces. It's just the
way you saw it. Ideally, a larger area is needed so that one could wander off,
but not so much larger. The size of this room maybe would be enough so that
you can see them present in a field of these objects, see them all at once.

PAUL CUMMINGS: But they were very strange because they were so long, some of
them.

ROBERT BREER: The idea is an animated drawing. There are lines represented,
lines. I should say that rods represent lines, and the ropes squiggle. I guess
it's another kind of approach to kinetic drawing of sorts, and it's the one
thing of it's kind. It started with one piece; it's just a long flat piece of
aluminum with a wheel at one end. It's six feet long and at the other end is
this blob which contains the motor. I thought of it as something akin to a painter
carrying maybe one of the planks of his thing across a yard. Carrying this long
white plank along, and the painter himself was the motor unit.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Have you done other pieces like that?

ROBERT BREER: Well, I did a piece that was at a Bonino show way back when,
before the floats. That was a wall piece. It might be forgotten now. There were
two pieces there, and they were panels really. That's what they were, and they
had squiggly lines drawn on white panel. In some cases, I made it with one drawn
line. The others were black coat hanger wire that came off and had a twist,
and they rotated very slowly so there's a whole feeling of being in motion.
They cast little shadows, but the shadows aren't so important. That might be
close to that thing or least the spirit of it.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Okay, we've come to the end here. Do you have any last words
to say? Anything we've missed that you think we should go into?

ROBERT BREER: Well, probably not.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

This transcript is in the public domain and may be used without permission. Quotes and excerpts must be cited as follows: Oral history interview with Robert Breer, 1973 July 10, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.